Under the Same Roof

"Under the Same Roof" is the story of Dr. Mark Henry Kinn's life as the child of Holocaust survivors. In a sensitive and compelling way, he illustrates the complex influences of the Holocaust: his fear of his father's anger, his conflicted feelings about religiosity, his guilt (for having a better and easier life than his parents) and the poignancy of his parents' will to live. In some families, the horrors of the Holocaust are repeatedly dissected. In Dr. Kinn's family, they were rarely discussed. "My mother wanted to move on. My father wanted to preserve his memories of the shtetl. They didn't want to traumatize us during our childhood, so they rarely spoke of their experiences. But they were our parents and they went through something unspeakably horrible, unimaginably evil. And we knew." "Under the Same Roof" is a memoir about the insidious and unrelenting influence of the Holocaust. It quietly illustrates how the scars of brutality and loss can color every action and twist the perception of every failure and triumph. Rather than an explicit story of war or trauma, "Under the Same Roof" describes how both shaped the life of a brilliant and empathetic son. For those who share a legacy of extreme suffering, ever-present fear and anxiety, this story will ring true. Anyone who seeks to understand the deep and often hidden consequences of intergenerational trauma will find Dr. Kinn's story an insightful read.

Dr. Mark Henry Kinn grew up both searching for and running from his parents’ tragic past. How do you live through a trauma that isn’t even your own? How does a child live with the poignancy and sadness of a generation, following him to school, to work, and out into a world that doesn’t understand? Kinn’s mother, Sonia, evaded the Nazis by hiding in the forest, but she never forgot her murdered family. His father, Phil, joined the Russian resistance, but sneaked back into the ghetto to find his father and sisters. Sonia and Phil met in 1944 when both joined a secret caravan of Jews escaping from Eastern Europe; both were struggling to move past the memory of extreme brutality and overwhelming loss. As Dr. Kinn explains, “My sister and I were left with an apocalyptic sense that our parents’ world had been uprooted, killed, destroyed. They thought they were hiding their past, protecting us from the Holocaust and its atrocities, but this made it worse. They rarely spoke about the Holocaust during our childhood yet it was there every day, in everything, omnipresent but never acknowledged, never explained.” In stories pieced together from early childhood to adulthood, "Under the Same Roof" sensitively illustrates the impact of the Holocaust on second-generation survivors. “You kids have Holocaust on the brain,” Kinn’s mother would say when he asked her about her experience in the woods or his father’s time in the resistance. This gentle and subtle memoir follows Mark Henry Kinn from a childhood full of secrets and unexpressed feelings (afraid of upsetting parents who had “been through so much”) to an adulthood of trying, both consciously and unconsciously, to heal his parents’ pain by becoming a doctor. "Under the Same Roof" is about the consequences of unimaginable horror. It’s about the struggle to discover an identity apart from an all-encompassing legacy of fear, anger, guilt and sadness. Told with great love for his heroic parents and a wish for a better life in the face of an inescapable past, "Under the Same Roof" is an insightful illustration of the consequences of intergenerational trauma.

Mark Henry Kinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, just five years after the end of WWII. As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, he was raised in the psychological aftermath of brutality and loss. Like many children of survivors, he sought a context for his parents' horrific experience and the existential threat of the atrocities they survived. "Under the Same Roof" was written as both a catharsis and a way of honoring his parents' strength. He describes his father as "an archetypal Jew, a devout warrior who blew up enemy railroads and killed Nazi soldiers." Believing fate drew him "back to the land of bedlam and blood," he studied medicine in Europe, at L'Université Catholique de Louvain, before returning to New York City, where he received his medical degree from New York University. He practiced medicine for twenty-five years and retired in 2005, a respected and compassionate physician. Dr. Kinn lives in New York City with his wife, artist Hannah Kinn. He writes and speaks about his experience as a second-generation survivor.